TweetCongress Lets You Succinctly Shout At Your Congresspeople Online

By alexchasickMarch 27, 2009

Missouri Senator and prolific Twitterer Claire McCaskill called our attention to TweetCongress which lets you look up your representative and senators and talk to them.

Each member’s participation and response will be different, of course, but it’s a good way to get a politician’s unfiltered thoughts and they do occasionally respond to direct messages. (We tried looking up our members’ info, but we live in DC and have no representation. Oh well.)

You know…with all the talk about Adrian Fenty (D.C. mayor) going off on all these undisclosed trips…I’m wondering if he’s not currying some kind of connections for a future run at Congress. Who wants to be mayor forever? He moved to the mayorship (mayorhood?) from the D.C. Council, why not onward to Congress, especially since it seems likely the bill to give D.C. representative rights is going to stick.

Some of my congresspeople are of the elderly set, let’s say, and I just envision them to react to twitter the same way my 88-year-old grandma reacted to when I tried to explain to her what e-mail is: confusion and apathy.

Then again, the senators and representatives aren’t the ones actually checking in, are they? Wouldn’t they have some twenty-something intern do most of the twitter dirty work for them?

@Yoko Broke Up The Beatles: Assuming they get more that 1 tweet a day, it’s almost certain that it’s someone in their office (probably a technically inclined intern(s)) that’s dealing with this type of thing and summarizing for the congressperson.

But hey, you never know, some older people are just as technologically involved as kids these days.

@Yoko Broke Up The Beatles: This is completely off-topic, but I find your username to be highly ridiculous. If you listen to any of the Beatles’ interviews on the subject, you’d realize very quickly that it’s an unsubstantiated rumor. Each member has stated numerous times that there were many, many factors involved in the band’s eventual break-up. John was already growing bored with the band, and I doubt that he would have had a change of heart if he hadn’t met Yoko. Rumors like these are started by the same people who called Yoko “Dragon Lady,” and I’m sure you don’t want to be associated with them.

I’m a fan of Claire McCaskill AND Twitter, maybe I should check this out.

On a semi-unrelated note, I actually live above Clair McCaskill’s offices in Springfield Missouri, and nearly every night someone lobs garbage (or…fruit? I can’t really tell what it is) at her windows. It’s tough being a democrat in this town I guess.

You know one thing that I’ve noticed since the Republicans got thoroughly trounced in these past two elections?

Since then, they’ve really, really started picking up on new technologies like Twitter and whatnot. Even if it’s just their staffers doing it, the people working for them are starting to get really connected.

I think people are going to be very surprised about eight years from now if this keeps up. (Or maybe even just four years.)

@mdmadph: You may be right, but I hope it’s not the twit herd who wile away their time broadcasting the minutiae of their daily routine on the internet that selects our next president. Bad enough that it was the naive, unserious lefty blog followers who brought us this one. It may seem old fashioned, but I’d rather have people who read whole books choosing our leaders as much as possible.

Somewhere, I have filed a mid-1990s email reply-bot response from John McCain, in which he asks me to recontact him about my issue by writing him a conventional letter on paper stationery and sending it via postal surface mail. Priceless. I gotta find that.

I just put my name on the petition to get Congressman Sam Johnson (TX district 3) on Twitter. We’ll see if he actually gets on — fat chance. He won’t even respond to a letter that I sent to him AND faxed to his office. What in the hell is up with these people? They forget that they work for us. We need term limits damn it!